Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Take Me In

One of the best parts of being at Squam was getting to share in more detail about my journey. In one class, a hand went up as a student tried to pull the timeline together. "How long ago was this?"

"Let's see," I counted. "Two and a half years ago."

Two and a half years ago, I completed a home-based business I'd been doing for eight years. I had a three-year-old and a three-month-old. I thought I wanted to write, though I had no idea really what I would write. Maybe I'd finish my practice novel.

Two and a half years ago, we said yes to the part of us that wanted to live in New York City. Even though we'd never been here in person. I watched You've Got Mail so many times back then, internalizing the conversation about how closing the store is brave, and how it takes a lot of courage to imagine a new life for yourself.

And that's just what we did. If I told you about our life, just four years ago, you would not even recognize huge swaths of it. Some things are the same, like our love and the friendships that remain. But it is a new life, and all the people I've met and places I've gone since then, were only wild, unlikely dreams.

And it only took saying yes to one wild dream to set us on this course. I didn't know what was going to happen back then, and I still don't know what's going to happen today. But I'm slowing learning to trust my dreams and those intuitive ways of knowing, and more and more I'm practicing being brave.

I'm so thankful for Stacy, who heard my story at Squam, and then sent me this song yesterday. I'm posting it here, for everyone who has even one wild dream calling her right now, for anyone hoping that following her intuition really will lead her someplace good in the end: